Outokumpu 2017

The Decameron is a festival-scale performance and art event which features visual art, installations, dance, music, circus, theater, poetry, scientific discourse and storytelling, all presented from within an intimate, immersive, interactive, site-specific theatrical scenario. It is a contemporary re-imagining of a historical frame novel.

After Climate Change collapses our civilization, a group of artists and thinkers welcome you to their refuge: the old Outokumpu mine. 10 days. 10 stories per day. 100 vignettes of visual art, performance, discourse and storytelling. From chaos comes Eden through the eyes of dreamers.

Boccaccio’s original Il Decamerone (1351) was a frame story, or series of stories embedded within an overarching context story, set during the plague in medieval Florence. Its collection of candid, witty and often satirical stories, told by the independent voices of seven young women and three young men, paints a lively and transparent picture of humanity in a transitional state. More than six hundred years later, we borrow key structural elements of the original Decameron to engage both artists and audience in a deep exploration of themes that resonate in our contemporary society.

The Decameron project was created to bring people together through creativity. It has been produced previously in Amsterdam in 2006 and in San Francisco in 2013.